


Some Call Fate

by beedekka



Category: True Detective
Genre: M/M, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 14:24:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4395284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beedekka/pseuds/beedekka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Season 2 represent!</p><p>Ray and Frank, in between Episode 3 and 4.   Ray isn't dealing very well with the reminder of his own mortality...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Call Fate

**Author's Note:**

> At the time of writing this I'd seen up to and including Episode 4. Episode 5 has just aired and I think the show is poised to rip the carpet away from under me, but up until here at least, those Black Rose scenes are plausibly hinting all sorts of dark and delicious possibilities about these guys. 
> 
> Fic contains references to firearms injury and alcohol and drug misuse. There's one very oblique reference to the experiences Frank had as a child.

He woke with a start, disorientated and choking on spit, hand reaching blindly for his gun before he realised that he wasn’t even dressed let alone wearing the holster.

“Jeez, easy there!” The voice next to him was rough, concerned. “You gonna puke?”

 _He just fucking might_. He rolled fast to lean over the side of the bed, bracing one palm clumsily on the polished wooden floorboards and trying to catch his breath against ribs that felt like a burning vice around his lungs. Was this destined to be his early morning alarm call now? Staring down at the bloody ruins of his own chest, only to wake up seconds later in an adrenalin-fuelled panic, like the shooter was still standing there over him, poised to finish him for real.

Strong hands hooked around his shoulders, holding him steady while time stood still and he sweated and dry heaved his soul up beside the bed. “Fucking Christ, Ray,” he heard Frank murmur. “Are you coming out of this anytime soon or what?”

He swallowed hard and nodded. “Gimme a second.” God, this felt embarrassing; Frank was taking his weight like a sack of shit. “Just… gimme a second.” After a little more awkward huffing he finally got his breathing under control, and his own muscles kicked in to let him roll himself back over and swipe his hand across his watery eyes. “I’m okay.”

“What was that? Some kind of fuckin’ anxiety thing? Were you having a nightmare?”

“Is this twenty questions? I breathed down spit, Columbo.” Ray touched his palm carefully against his bruised ribs and grimaced. “I hurt like hell. You got any painkillers here?”

“In the bathroom.”

“The good stuff?”

“I don’t know. Suck ‘em and see.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I haven’t got a tolerance level you can measure by the sound of rattling when I walk, so you’ll have to judge their efficacy for yourself.”

Ray snorted. “Alright.” He made to get up, but Frank caught his arm again, fingers light on his skin this time.

“Wait a second. Ray…”

“Don’t.” Ray cut him off. “Whatever you’re going to ask. If it’s about last night, I can’t remember all of what we talked about, so just humour me and pretend to forget anything that you might reasonably assume was against my better judgement, okay?” He didn’t look to see Frank’s reaction, more concerned about getting up off the bed without twisting too much, but the hand on his arm pulled away like it was touching fire, so Ray figured that Frank hadn’t been expecting that. What had they done last night?

He shut the bathroom door behind him and leaned heavily on the sink. This wasn’t the first time he’d woken up in bed next to Frank – not by a long way – but it was the first time for a long time, and that was… Well, he didn’t really have a phrase for what it was: a ‘sad indictment’ perhaps, that at the grand age of 40 years, blind drunk and recently gutshot, the place of greater safety his mind had apparently seen fit to supply him with last night was ‘Frank’. He caught his own eye in the mirror and gave himself the expression he thought that warranted. _Not a good choice._ Not a good choice, and not a good reflection on his mental state.

He turned the water on as cold as it would go and splashed away the sticky trails from under his eyes, grateful that it was the only mess on his face. Then he opened the cabinet and read off the labels on the pill bottles, looking for anything that sounded strong enough to be worth it. There were a couple of contenders; evidently Frank was carrying some sort of injury painful enough to fill a scrip for opiates every so often. Ray popped two from the bottle that instructed to take one and not drive, and slugged them down with some pink mouthwash that looked like it had been irradiated. Then he took a piss and stared at himself in the mirror again.

Even if he glossed over the questionable decision-making process that had seen him somehow leave the comfortable drinking surroundings of his own home in favour of going back to the Black Rose, he was still blanking on why that had ended up with him here in Frank’s downtown apartment. It couldn’t have been sex, ‘cause he didn’t feel like he’d got laid, and Frank wasn’t the kind of guy who got off on fucking people when they were stagger-drunk and hurting either. He could remember arriving at the bar and Felicia being even more gentle with him than usual, and then somewhere along the line there was broken glass everywhere, and Frank suddenly appearing by his shoulder to unceremoniously divest him of his car keys and pull him out into the fresh air. After that…?

Ray groaned and resisted the urge to bang his head against the mirror, although it couldn’t have made the pressure-headache he was currently nursing any worse. He reached for a towel and wiped his face instead, before winding it around his waist. Why ever the hell he was naked, it was concerning him far less at that moment than the realisation that it must have been in front of Frank that the messy, soul-wrenching existential breakdown that had been hanging over him for the last 48 hours had finally played itself out; in a way that was pitiful enough for Frank to let him stay here all night, too – to stay beside him, even. Well, shit.

When he came out of the bathroom, Frank was just putting his phone down, and they looked at each other impassively for a moment until Ray gave up on the hope that he was going to speak first and cleared his throat. “Look, Frank, I didn’t mean to end up laying all my shit out on you. I didn’t plan that. I think my mind just went to… the past, and I…”

“…grabbed blindly for someone who might actually care that you didn’t die in West Hollywood that night?” Frank finished for him.

“I said that to you?” Ray asked, perturbed.

“In between rambling about scars you can’t see, prophetic dreams that play over the radio, and a lady who carries knives under her clothes.”

 _Jesus Christ._ “I said that to you.” Ray closed his eyes and crossed his arms over his aching ribs. Suddenly, wearing only a towel didn’t feel like enough; too many bruises on show when apparently he’d already worn his psyche inside out. His pants were on the floor by the bed and he weighed up the pain of bending down for them, finally deciding that Frank wasn’t exactly a stranger to his body and he could get the same coverage for less agony by lying back down in the bed. Frank seemed a little surprised when he rolled back in, but he didn’t comment on it either.

“Did you find what you wanted in the bathroom?”

“Yeah.”

“And, you’re in a better frame of mind now, right? Spilling your guts over… not spilling your guts got whatever cathartic crisis you needed to go through out of your system?”

What was the answer to that meant to be, other than ‘yes’? Ray thought about saying ‘no’ just to see his reaction, but Frank sounded so fucking earnest about his bullshit question that he didn’t have the heart for it. “I’m back to being angry again,” he told him instead. “Sober, and angry, and I’m staying that way.”

“Good.” _Relieved_. “Then you can get your focus back on finding this shithead who took my money and shot you.” _Afterthought._ Ray was glad he was the detective and not the other way around, because if Frank was a) buying his answer, and b) as oblivious as he seemed to be about how much he telegraphed his own feelings when he was explicitly trying not to, then this fucking case would have even less chance of getting solved than it already did.

He sighed and tried to shift the pillows underneath him while moving as little of his body as possible.

“Is it still that bad?” Frank asked him, indicating the bruised portion of his torso that was half covered, half horribly visible where the sheets folded back.

“Your medicine cabinet is getting me towards just about, maybe, perhaps not feeling like my lungs are being stuck with knives every time I breathe.”

“Oh.”

They lapsed into uneasy silence after that, until Frank reached for his watch, read it and sat up. “I have to take a shower and get out of here soon. Got a meeting in the city this morning.”

“You want me to leave.” Ray left it as a statement rather than a question, but Frank shook his head.

“I ain’t that much of a bastard. If you want to give the pills a bit longer, another fuckin’ hour on top of ‘all night’ in my bed isn’t exactly here or there, Velcoro.” He stood up carefully as he spoke – trying not to pull the covers around – and went in to the bathroom without looking back.

It left Ray to stare at the ceiling and listen to the muffled noise of the shower running as Frank Semyon washed off the last 8 hours and got ready to play nasty with the world again. _'Velcoro'_. So it seemed that Frank was giving up pretty easily on the rekindled closeness that last night’s shitshow had unwittingly stirred up… Ray hadn’t given him the impression he remembered enough of it, he supposed.

That was kind of ironic, because as the drugs were finally kicking in to push the pain out and let his mind gel back together properly, he was actually starting to recall all of it: how Frank's face had turned ashen when Ray slurred out that he felt like his corpse was still lying there in a pool of piss on the floor of that soundproofed hellhole; how Frank hadn’t questioned or tried to deflect him when Ray had stripped off and got into the bed like he belonged there, and how Frank had held him in the dark and promised him that they were both alive and _that mattered._

Yeah. 

Okay. 

Maybe his subconscious hadn’t chosen such a strange place to seek sanctuary after all. 


End file.
